Gov. Deal vetoes religious liberty bill

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (Rep.) announced his veto House Bill 757 on Monday, March 28 at a news conference in Atlanta. Pinned the “religious liberty bill,” the legislation would have enumerated faith-based organizations and religious leaders for choosing to refuse service or employment they find contradictory to their religious beliefs.

“HB 757 doesn’t reflect the character of our state or the character of our people,” said Deal at the news conference.

The bill was said to be “anti-LGBT” because it would allow businesses to deny services to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people. Deal cited that the bill “contained language that could give rise to state-sanctioned discrimination.”

Conjecture about how this bill would negatively affect the economy surfaced. Corporations including Disney, Netflix and Apple, among others, all threatened the removal of business from the state upon passing of the bill. The NFL said passing this bill could cost the state an opportunity to host a future Super Bowl.

Deal did not cite these pressures as the reason for his veto.

“This is about the character of our state and the character of our people. Georgia is a welcoming state. It is full of loving, kind and generous people,” Deal said about his veto decision. “I intend to do my part to keep it that way. For that reason I will veto House Bill 757.”

The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy and political lobbying organization in the nation, wrote an open letter to Deal on March 24 urging him to not sign the bill. It described Georgia as the “Hollywood of the South” and emphasized how heavily the state economy relies on funds from production and the movie industry.

“We pride ourselves on running inclusive companies, and while we have enjoyed a positive partnership on productions in Georgia, we will plan to take our business elsewhere if any legislation sanctioning discrimination is signed into state law,” said the letter.

Georgia Sen. Mike Crane (Rep.) called for a special session in hopes to override Deal’s veto. A three-fifth’s majority in the Georgia House of Representative and Senate to establish a “veto session.” If the session is called, a two-third’s majority in both chambers will override the veto.

State Sen. Bill Heath told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution on March 28 that he “will call for a veto session.”

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2 thoughts on “Gov. Deal vetoes religious liberty bill”

It’s a shame he vetoed it. It certainly had nothing to do with the facts; it had everything to do with political correctness and Leftwing ideology.

The fact is that transgenderism is a mental illness.

The science says it is. Pop culture and Bruce Springsteen say it isn’t.

Sorry, but “The Boss” and pop culture doesn’t persuade me as much as the scientific experts who have studied transgenderism for decades does.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACP), for example, just issued a stern statement warning LGBTQ activists of the dangers that gender ideology poses to those who have the disorder.

The recent ACP statement denied much of the politically correct rhetoric used by transgender activists, with doctors calling for a more sober and realistic look at what the idea of gender fluidity actually does to the young people affected by it.

Like a splash of ice water, the physicians declared that human sexuality is “an objective biological binary trait” rather than an infinite series of self-determined “genders.”

The norm for human design, the doctors said, “is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species,” and therefore, “XY” and “XX” are “genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder.”

While everyone is born with a biological sex, the doctors noted, their awareness of their sexuality develops over time and “may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward.” Helping them accept their objective sexual identity is one of the objectives of good parenting and intelligent education.

“A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the physicians said.

“When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”

These are the specialists in the field talking, folks.

Therefore, to treat this gender confusion as a good and normal thing, or to encourage it as LGBTQ activists and college student virtue-signallers are doing, constitutes an attack on the afflicted that can only mean serious problems for them in the future.

Thinking of oneself as belonging to a different sex than one’s biological sex is a psychological pathology known as “gender dysphoria,” the medical and psychiatric specialists said, which is “a recognized mental disorder.”

The doctors also noted that the use of puberty-blocking hormones, a common treatment among the promoters of gender ideology, is exceedingly dangerous and involves serious health risks including “high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.” Moreover, suicide rates “are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery,” they added.

Pulling no punches, the doctors stated that conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is “child abuse.”

This is the conditioning that your friendly neighborhood college-aged social justice warriors and the LGBT lobby are trying to foist on parents and educators and poor, naive college students as somehow the right way to treat the sexually confused.

And yet, the doctors insist, what “compassionate and reasonable person would condemn children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?”